Were going to go for 1 ep a week! Really! I mean it! Possibly 2!
Get your ass to Matsumoto at once! If someone else had said about Harlock being released once or twice every week, that would have looked nice. BUT NOT YOU!
Too late. He's been been back for two weeks now and is busy working his ass off. Masakari is
not Tofu. He didn't disappear without notice. He told us that he was going to concentrate on finishing the school year. And, if I remember correctly, he did warn us when he was going to be completely out of contact for those last few weeks. He's been planning this summer subbing blitz for a while now.
Personally, I think releasing one Harlock episode a week is a little optomistic but it is possible, despite the other projects that Matsumoto is working on.
Live-eviL's Matsumoto division has attracted a lot of good talent lately. We picked up a timer recently who either times an episode far faster than I do or who doesn't have a social life. (Gawd, he's good!)
And our new translation checker! 20 minutes after she joined Matsumoto YaoiBoy gave her an episode to transation check. Three hours later she posts "Done!". My jaw dropped.
Having new people means that it is possible that we might be able to get one Harlock episode out per week and still work on our other projects. Here's the plan.
Captain Harlock was originally translated by CornPone flicks. We have permission to use their translation. So we don't need to translate. This is where the bottleneck usually is.
Masakari will be transcribing, editing and translation checking the CornPone releases. This means that he watches the episodes, types in the dialog, edits the dialog and then checks the English against the original Japanese. Translation checking is the usual second bottleneck. He did episode 15 last night. He plans to do episode 14 tonight. Currently, he's doing much more than one per week.
MazoneMayu is our new timer. He's much faster than me. For now.
He's been devoting about one Sunday per week to fan-subbing for a while now. If he can't quite do one per week, I may have time to help. My main focus for July will be in editing and releasing the remaining Creamy Mami episodes, now that Tsubasa is translation checking them. But I can time a lot faster now than I could a month ago, so I may take a break and time an episode or two.
YaoiBoy will be doing sound engineering and encoding. That's right.
Sound engineering. He takes the sound track, extracts the voices, then adds new sound effects. The result is awesome. He does this for several Matsumoto and Live-eviL projects. On the side, he also manages the Matsumoto division, trains it's staff, manages it's computer support services, is working on adding english voice tracks (dubbing) to some episodes, helps Live-eviL with release and distribution, and works on other stuff completely outside of Live-eviL. I don't know how he does it but he usually gets everything done about the time he originally said he would. He's
awesome to work for.
Now we come to where I think the bottle neck will be. Quality control (QC). Live-eviL has very high quality standards. Each QC encode is checked by at least three people. If there's more than a few fixes then it's checked again by three people. The final encode is watched at least once before it is released. While it usually only takes a few days to have something go through QC, there have been times when something will sit for several weeks because there aren't enough people available to QC it.
Now for the bad news. So far this year, Live-eviL has averaged about 1.5 releases per week. If Masakari and company do manage to release one Harlock episode per week, if Tsubasa and I manage to release one Creamy Mami episode per week, if the Detective Academy Q people achieve their goal of more than one a week in order to finish this summer, and if the Yawara crowd continues to increase production like their planning to then we're looking at well over 4 releases per week. I doubt we'll quite achieve all of this, but I wouldn't be suprised if Live-eviL achieves three episodes per week.
That is, f we can find more quality control staff. Our QC staff size shrunk recently and our output's about to double. If you're thinking you'd like to get involved in fan subbing, please volunteer. It's a great way to learn how fan subbing works. You get to see episodes long before everyone else. All you do is download an episode, spend under an hour watching it and typing notes, then uploading the result. I have a lot of fun doing it. And I've seen a lot of fun stuff I never would have downloaded on my own.
So, if you really do like Captain Harlock, or if you're curious about how fan-subbing works,
please think about volunteering.
